Bonded Labour and the Tea Plantation Economy

Souparna Lahiri

Economic histories of western colonialism amply testify to
the overriding presence of plantations in colonial economies. In Brazil and
Malaysia it was rubber, in the West Indies it was sugar and in India it was tea.
The conditions of labour in plantation economies, as historic evidence points
out, have always been a matter of concern. Coercion and super-exploitation have
always been the characteristics of the plantation economies. The migrant nature
of its labour and social divisions have also contributed to the economic and
social exclusion of the plantation labour. Like any other plantation economy,
the tea plantation economy in India can thus be referred to as an enclave
economy.

Tea plantation industry of Assam and West Bengal, together
constituting the most productive region in the world, is more than 150 years
old. There are more than 1500 tea estates in these two states employing around
1.1 million workers. Only during the last 50 years, in the post-independence
period, has the tea plantation industry been covered by labour legislation,
namely, the Plantation Labour Act, 1951. The first labour union, recognised by
the industry, also came into being in 1947-48.

The tea industry in India has steadily prospered all through
these years and is making huge profits even in the days of downturn. In 1998-99,
India produced more than 850 million kgs. of tea whose market value was Rs.6,000
crores and exported 21.3 per cent of the total produce earning a foreign
exchange equivalent of Rs.2,000 crores.

On the other hand, the tea plantation workers are still paid
wages below the minimum wage of agricultural workers. An industry, which is
highly capitalistic in character, considering its international marketing and
financial activities, still pay their workers partly in cash and kind. Since
1947, the wage of the tea plantation labour has increased only numerically,
there has been no rise in their real wage. In essence, the industry has still
maintained feudal relations of production and a highly structured organisation
of production in its pre-marketing phases thus reaping super-profits on the
basis of semi-feudal, extra-economic coercion and exploitation.

The literacy rate among the tea garden workers and their
families is a poor 20 per cent. Around one-third of the workforce is denied
housing facilities. Every year, hundreds of people in the plantations die from
water-borne diseases like gastro-enteritis and cholera. Most of the plantations
have no potable drinking water facilities and drainage systems.

The majority of the workers are suffering from anaemia and
tuberculosis. Malaria is rampant. There are tea gardens where at least one in
every family is suffering from tuberculosis. And the children and women are the
worst affected. Only one per cent of the tea garden population is considered
active after attaining 60 years. The infant mortality rate is very high, far
above the state and national averages. The death rate is 11.4 for every
thousand. The company health system has completely collapsed. There are
dispensaries and garden hospitals, but as the workers themselves say, for ‘treating
cuts and wounds, distributing an all-purpose red mixture and even expired
medicines’. In 1998, around 600 people died in the tea gardens of Assam due to
gastro-enteritis, an almost equal number died in the gardens of West Bengal too.
But this does not create ripples neither in the administration nor in political
circles. The lush green façade of the tea plantations remain as serene and calm
as ever.

The ethnicity of the tea workforce is probably one reason why
nobody cares. More than 85 per cent of the tea plantation workers of Assam and
West Bengal are tribals, fourth generation immigrants of indentured migrants
from the Central Indian tribal heartland. Majority of the rest are lower castes
originating from the same region. In Assam, they do not enjoy any the special
status, as their brethrens elsewhere do. They are merely referred to as the tea
labour and ex-tea labour community. The children cannot avail of any reservation
facility in educational institutions, the youth do not enjoy any opportunity in
the employment sphere. After passing from the lower primary schools of the
gardens, they are forced to join the tea labour workforce as unskilled workers
with no educational and alternative employment opportunity. Generation after
generation, they remain tied to the gardens. They are ‘born in the gardens and
die in the gardens’. They are the epitome of modern day bonded labour – the
forced and unfree labour.

Quite surprisingly, the tea plantation industry is considered
to be the largest organised industry in India employing the largest workforce.
The workers are unionised. In West Bengal, there are 32 recognised unions. In
Assam, the Assam Cha Mazdoor Sangh (ACMS) is representing the workers for the
last 50 years, and is the only recognised union, though there are some more
registered unions, some of them even affiliated to the central trade unions.
Yet, there is not a single tea plantation where the Plantation Labour Act (PLA)
is fully implemented. The wage agreements reflect more the domination and power
of the tea industry associations. The workers are never considered to be skilled
except a handful who work in the tea processing factories. They remain unskilled
as ever with no promotional avenues open to them. Every worker, permanent or
temporary, young or old, inexperienced or experienced, receives the same wage
and are classified as daily wage workers. There is no question of computing
dearness allowance or variable dearness allowance according to the scale of the
Consumer Price Index (CPI). They do not receive Sunday wage. For them Sunday is
an unpaid holiday. Arrears due after every wage agreement are seldom paid. The
collective bargaining process in the tea industry does not reflect the other
necessary aspirations of the tea workers. The agreements are conspicuously
silent on housing, healthcare, educational and other facilities.

The last ten years of wage agreements show that the tea
employers have not conceded any major demand of the trade unions. The tea
associations have not agreed to the CPI-linked variable DA, minimum wage
calculation according to the prescribed norms of treating a family as three
consumption units, establishment of central hospitals, clearing the huge backlog
of providing houses to the workers, providing adequate drinking water, drainage
and electricity facilities to all the gardens, clearing provident fund dues,
early gratuity to the retired workers and regularisation of all temporary
workers. Nearly 40 per cent of the workers in the tea plantations of West Bengal
and Assam are today temporary and casual workers. And their numbers are further
increasing. Which means that these workers are not covered under and protected
by the PLA. The tea industry thus is reaping all the benefits without investing
a single paisa on a large section of its workforce.

Major struggles and strikes are few and far between. In 1969,
there was a 21-day strike in the plantations demanding regularisation of
temporary workers. Not much was conceded by the industry other than absorbing
about 10,000 temporary workers. Last year, in July, the tea workers in West
Bengal struck work for 10 days. An agreement was drawn up regarding
regularisation of the temporary workforce, establishment of central hospitals
and revamping the healthcare structure in the tea gardens. Nothing has been done
so far. The strike was withdrawn only when the agreement was drawn up and signed
at the intervention of Mr. Jyoti Basu, the chief minister of West Bengal.

The agreements in West Bengal are tripartite in nature,
whereas it is bipartite in Assam where the government is not a party. The
long-term understanding with the INTUC-affiliated ACMS has given the Assam
employers a clear domination and stranglehold over the industry. Officially,
there is no labour unrest, industrial relations peaceful and ACMS,
understandably, ‘co-operates with the industry’. In West Bengal, any demand
by the workers and the unions, termed unfair by the industry, is either flatly
rejected, or is repeatedly discussed by the tea industry in a series of
consultations, a delaying tactic mainly, until the unions are fed up and ask the
government to intervene. All the agreements that have been drawn up at the
intervention of the state government, have favoured the employers and not the
workers. Like the aftermath of last year’s strike and the eventual agreement,
there is a lot of resentment amongst the workers, but the very threat to their
survival forces them to keep quiet and accept the verdict. For a tea plantation
worker, whose forefathers were indentured immigrants, and were born and brought
up inside the tea gardens, dismissal means not only the loss of livelihood but a
threat to their general existence. With no familial connection with their
original homeland, they have nowhere to go, nowhere to work, once they are
turned out of their gardens. They are forced to choose a life of meek
acceptance.

It is therefore very clear that beyond a point even the
phenomenon of an hundred per cent unionisation does not matter much. A trade
union exists much more at a micro level, at the plantation unit level, where
their existence helps the tea workers, otherwise secluded and isolated from the
mainstream, at least, to address their daily needs. The trade unions have been
their only link with the outside world. At a more macro level, the trade unions
have contributed much less. One reason could be the absence of leaders from the
working community itself. The trade unions in West Bengal are mostly controlled
by the Bengali Bhadralok who do not even work in the tea gardens. Very
few of the central office bearers are from the tea industry or from the workers
themselves. At the plantation level, leaders are mostly from the sub-staff, who
belong to the same ethnic groups as the workers, but are supervisors by
occupation. Going by the hierarchical set-up of the tea plantations, they
command a large group of workers from their own ethnic group and are in-charge
of them. Due to the internal organisational set-up of the plantations and ethnic
solidarity, these sub-staff command a very strong loyalty of the workers under
them. It is quite possible that this organisational dynamics has been very
consciously incorporated into the organisational dynamics of the labour unions.
So, the trade unions have to only make an effort to initiate the people from the
sub-staff level into their organisations. The workers will follow suit.

In Assam, ACMS works under a strong political stranglehold of
the Congress(I). But, the leaders are from the tea community, again, the
sub-staff. The same phenomenon is observed in other trade unions also. Of
course, the Assamese here do not aspire to be the leaders of the tea plantation
unions. The unions are not representative of the women workers either. Women, as
a whole, are the back-bone of the plantation economy and social life. The
majority of the workers are women. Any change in the organisation of work and
economy in a plantation affects them first and foremost. Similarly, the women
also remain the potential agents for any change likely to come in an enclave
economy like that of the plantations.

With the institution of labour laws and the PLA in the tea
plantation industry, it is the women who have been the prime target of
deprivation and exploitation. Ten years before, they were paid less than the
men. They have been subjected to long working hours and heavy workload. Even the
pregnant women are not spared from activities like deep hoeing. The
profit-hungry industry has been slowly marginalising the women. The majority of
the temporary workers, today, are women. For them, social welfare benefits under
PLA including maternity and medical benefits do not exist. The permanent women
workers are also discriminated or against. Their parents, husbands are not
regarded as dependants. Their husbands are not entitled to subsidised foodgrains
and medical benefits. And, these practices are not only perpetrated by tea
companies under the government undertakings or private sector only, the track
record of some of the multinational tea giants like Unilever, Williamson Magor
and McLeod Russel is no different. They are all party to the sin of employing
forced labour and not allowing a free labour market to develop thus rendering
tea labour unfree.

The trade unions in the tea industry are operating under the
same hierarchical and organisational set up master-minded and practiced by the
planters right from the colonial days. Beyond a point, logic says that they will
never be able to confront the tea industry to struggle for the betterment and
uplift of the tea workers. The trade unions have to understand this and have to
undergo a major organisational change to survive and be able to discharge their
responsibilities towards the tea plantation workers.

Trade unions have to emerge as a much stronger force in a
milieu where social responsibilities do not exist.